21 March 2008

LinkedIn is Utilitarian

According to Techcrunch, they use some internal and some third party information, as well as bots, to populate pages.

They say:

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “headliners” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Incredibly useful? Yes - when combined with the other LinkedIn features. People group or tribal coherence is greatly enhanced by having pages of professional focus.

The innovator in me sees this as a boring and obvious move. I've criticized LinkedIn in the past for not innovating. What I am seeing now is that LinkedIn has little interest in innovating - but does have a desire to constantly improve.